Category: Talks

Slugs Embrace Yolo @ CAMP[8]

Santa Cruzans migrated en masse to Yolo County last weekend for CAMP[8], to participate in the eighth edition of the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics, held at UC Davis from Nov 14-16. CAMP featured presentations (in chronological order) from Matt Wagers (“Hands-on LLM Tutorial”, with Rachel Ryskin), Matthew Kogan & Ruoqing Yao (“Sources of distortion and confusion in distributed representations of morphosyntactic structure”, with Wagers) & Cal Boye-Lynn (“A Fricative by Any Other Name: A Close Replication of Shinn & Blumstein (1984)”, with Grant McGuire & Amanda Rysling).

It also featured encounters with a number of barn-yard animals, like a Muscovy duck (pictured), some friends from UCLA (also pictured), and near-collisions with Davis’ famously numerous cyclists (imagined anxiously).

Promenading duck at the Ruhstaller Farm. Photo credit: Subhs Shrestha.

Linguists, Applied Linguists and Psychologists, oh my! L to r: Shrestha, Liu, Chan (APLX), Boye-Lynn, Hoversten (PSYC), Rysling, Yao, Kogan, Duff (UCLA Linguistics; UCSC Ph.D. ’23), Carpick, Wagers. Photo credit: M. Afkir.

Beatty at NWAV

Sam Beatty, who graduated in Spring 2025, presented a poster at NWAV 53 at the University of Michigan (11/5-7), entitled ‘Gendered voices and transgender bodies: Interlocutor gender identity and linguistic variation in trans speakers’. The poster was co-authored with Grant McGuire and Ivy Sichel, and was based on their honors thesis. Sam reports that they received meaningful feedback, interacted with other sociolinguists, and had a great time overall.

Beatty, Sichel, & McGuire (2025)

Kaiser Cavalcade

Last week we were fortunate to be joined by Elsi Kaiser (USC) who gave two talks during a multi-day visit.

In our inaugural colloquium of the year, on Friday, October 24, we heard Do birds of a feather flock together? Exploring interpretation and dissimilation of third person pronouns in English and Finnish. This talk brought together evidence from judgment, sentence processing and corpus studies to examine how clauses containing two pronominal arguments are interpreted — an underexplored area both in sentence processing and in the syntax & semantics of Finnish.

Only the day before, Elsi gave a presentation in s/lab, Experimenting with semantics and pragmatics: On subjective predicates and perspective-taking.

Friday night, we got to celebrate at a potluck hosted by Roumi, where a good time was had by all, and especially by one compelling feline [vide infra].

Newly issued trading card in the Experimental Semantics series. Photo credit: Jungu Kang.

Did someone mention “birds of a feather”? Photo credit: Jungu Kang.

Six Slugs A-sinnin’!

According to Wiktionary, a collective of slugs may be referred to as a cornucopia. With all due emphasis on that modal, there’s no denying that Banana Slugs were copious at last month’s edition of Sinn und Bedeutung. Held at Goethe University Frankfurt, SuB30 featured presentations from many community members:

You can see most of these folks pictured below!

(l to r): Sharf, Knick, Hofmann, Unidentified Frankfurter, Li, Tamura. Not pictured: Cao.

LURC 2025

The 2025 Linguistics Undergraduate Research Conference (LURC) took place on Friday, May 30. One of the longest running traditions in the Department, the conference featured the largest number of student presenters ever — 31! A total of 13 posters were presented by undergraduates on their original research across six subdisciplines: phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics, semantics, sociolinguistics, and syntax.

Every year, the conference features a Distinguished Alumnus/a Speaker, and this year was no exception. Anissa Zaitsu (BA, 2017; MA, 2018), currently a PhD student at Stanford, gave the keynote talk: “When negative concord fails: Focus, alternatives, and the semantics of double negation.”

Sharvit Colloquium on Friday

This Friday, Yael Sharivit from UCLA will give the second colloquium talk of the fall quarter, titled “Assessing two theories of clausal complementation”. The talk will take place on Friday, 10/27, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

Her abstract is as follows:

Some clause-taking verbs can also take DPs (e.g., ‘believe’), some cannot (e.g., ‘think’), and some can appear without a complement (e.g., ‘groan’). The standard theory of complementation has to resort to lexical ambiguity to explain this. An alternative (due to Kratzer and others) says that “complements” of clause-taking predicates are not arguments, thereby offering a way to explain this variation without resorting to lexical ambiguity. I argue that this alternative fails to deliver the right truth conditions of certain attitude reports.

Bennett colloquium on Friday

This Friday, our own Ryan Bennett will give the first colloquium talk of fall quarter/school year, titled “Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko”.  The talk will take place on Friday, 10/13, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

His abstract is as follows:

Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be phonetic in character, reflecting extreme vowel reduction rather than symbolic deletion: it is variable, gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement. Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to [C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).

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